Sunday, January 24, 2010

What Old School fans agree on is that older editions are much fun to play today as they were back in the day.

There is nothing in the Open Game License that requires me to use the entirety of the d20 SRD. If I don't use feats, multi-classing, sorcerers, very long stat blocks, limit the monster abilities, etc; what is left is a game similar to the older editions. This is the fundamental foundation that underlies much of effort that goes into publishing for older editions.

I know these comments may seem like Old School 101 but after reading the Nth long winded discussion about the OSR I felt it would be good to restate the basics.

As for why people are writing and publishing Old School material I refer you to the quote in the upper right of this blog.

Then there is the Old School Primer which is helpful in learning how to make the minimal rules found in the oldest editions your own.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.